News in English about Cuba focusing on Human Rights but including general news relevant to the issues.

Sunday, May 7, 2017

Freedom House Rates Cuba Among the Worst Countries for the Practice of Journalism

Freedom House Rates Cuba Among the Worst Countries for the Practice of
Journalism

According to Freedom House, the Government "could not prevent an
improvement in the scope and quality of the information available."
14ymedio, Havana, 28 April 2017 — Freedom House has again placed Cuba
among the worst countries to exercise journalism in and continues to
assign the 91 points the American NGO gave it last year, according to
its annual Freedom of the Press Report, published on Friday.

Every year the document evaluates the quality of the journalistic
profession in 199 countries and territories analyzed on a scale of 0 to
100, where the higher the number the lower the press freedom.

According to the NGO, 31% of the countries have a "free" press, 36% have
a "partially free" press, and in the remaining 33% there is no press
freedom.

Thus, of the 66 countries in which Freedom House believes there is not a
free right to information, Cuba is among the ten worse that have
attained the highest scores. North Korea and Turkmenistan lead the
"worst" list with 98 points, followed by Uzbekistan (95), Crimea (94),
Eritrea (94), Cuba (91), Equatorial Guinea (91), Azerbaijan (90), Iran
(90) and Syria (90).

"Although Cuba remains one of the most closed media environments in the
world, several new news websites emerged on the island in 2016, and the
more established outlets expanded their reach," the NGO said. "In
response, authorities stepped up arrests and intimidation of critical
journalists, seizing their materials and preventing some from traveling
abroad to trainings or conferences. However, the regime was unable to
prevent an improvement in the range and quality of information available."

In the breakdown of indicators taken into account for the preparation of
the report, Cuba obtained 28 negative points out of 30 in the Legal
Environment, 35 out of 40 in the Political Environment and 28 out of 30
in the Economic Environment, and, in addition, the report notes that the
internet penetration index on the island is only 31%.

However, despite the low levels of freedom of the press on the island,
Freedom House has warned that "Global press freedom declined to its
lowest point in 13 years in 2016 amid unprecedented threats to
journalists and media outlets in major democracies and new moves by
authoritarian states to control the media, including beyond their borders."

This Wednesday, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) also placed Cuba in
173rd place in its 2017 World Press Classification, where, according to
the NGO's cataloging system, the island is two places below last year,
in the worst area of ​​the list (colored in black) and next to "the
worst dictatorships and totalitarian regimes in Asia and the Middle East."

Cuba is the only country on the American continent and the Caribbean
that is in the part of the list very near to the end.

The analysis of the quality of freedom of the press in Cuba published by
Freedom House and RSF contrast with the report Attacks on the Press
published Tuesday by the Committee for the Protection of Journalists
(CPJ), according to which "Cuba's media landscape has begun opening up
in recent years," thanks to a timid increase in Internet connectivity
and a generation of journalists" who are critical of, yet still support,
socialist ideas."